Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Saturday April 14, 2007 @08:05AM
from the so-easy-a-kid-can-do-it dept.

SurturZ writes "A fifteen year old from Perth, Australia, posed as an employee of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, demanding that YouTube remove hundreds of video clips of 'The Chasers War on Everything.' The amusing part is that The Chaser is a comedy company well known to perpetrate exactly this sort of prank."

The ironic part to this is that the ABC releases episodes of The Chaser for free, in video podcast form. Also when they announced the video podcast last year, they plugged BitTorrent for helping distributing the show! In fact, the first BitTorrent release of the show was released by one of the hosts... So it dosn't seem like The Chaser are against piracy, only the ABC.

If you live in Australia and haven't seen The Chaser it's one of the funniest shows that we've got (9pm on ABC 1). If you don't live here, you can download every episode, legally at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/vodcast/ [abc.net.au].

The ABC is, in fact, Australia's equivalent of the BBC or CBC: a crown corporation that acts as a national and international broadcaster. There is no direct equivalent in the United States, where it would be dismissed as "state-run television".

If you take a look at The Chaser's vodcast page it says the following, which I believe contradicts Ms Gibson's comments:

This video podcast is made available for use by persons located in Australia only. If you are not located in Australia, you are not authorised to use this podcast. The ABC grants you a licence to download these audio-visual files for your private, personal, domestic, non-commercial use only. You may not use these audio-visual files for any other purpose (including but without limitation downloading, editing, or using these files for the purpose of (a) distribution to a third party; or (b) promoting, advertising, endorsing or implying a connection with you (or any third party) and the ABC, its agents or employees).

This is actually quite annoying for me because (as an Australian) I pay for them to make this show, but I am not allowed to convert the episodes to Vorbis/Theora and put them on a website for other people to download.

This is one of the major faults with the DMCA. If someone claiming to be the copyright holder contacts you with a takedown notice, you don't really have any recourse but to comply. The only situation in which you don't is if you know that you own the copyright. However there's not really a way to verify if the person contacting you is legit or not, you just have to assume they are, or risk trouble.

I've dealt with several where I work. We get the e-mail (that's how they arrive) forwarded to us. I then go and see if the computer they said actually has the files they claimed. If so, I take it down. Now in our case it's always been clear cut, things like a student's system got hacked and it is acting as an XDCC bot serving up movies, but I have no way of knowing if the complainant is actually the copyright holder or not. I have to act on the complaint anyhow.

So it's not really a scam, it is companies doing what they must to comply with a bad law.

Good point. There's a world of difference between an intelligent prank like this, which is not only funny but makes a serious political point, and the usual 15-year-old prank. "Oh, dude, we totally fuckin' spread dog shit all over the doors of the school! It was fuckin' awesome, hey! People were all, like, 'Eww, that's so gross!' Seniors rule!"